Anathemas and Admirations Read online

  A hankering for evil is innate — no need to acquire it by effort. The child exercises his nasty instincts from the first — with what skill, what competence, and what rage! A pedagogy worthy of the name should prescribe sessions in a straitjacket. And perhaps, past childhood, we should extend this measure to every age, for the good of all concerned.

  Woe to the writer who fails to cultivate his megalomania, who sees it diminished without taking action. He will soon discover that one does not become normal with impunity.

  I was suffering from torments I could not dispel. A ring at the door; I opened it: a lady of a certain age whom I was certainly not expecting. For three hours she assailed me with such nonsense that my torments turned to rage, I was saved.

  Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet, Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.

  Two friends, both actresses in a country of eastern Europe. One decamps to the West, becoming rich and famous there; the other remains where she is, poor and obscure. Half a century later, the second woman takes a trip and pays a visit to her fortunate colleague. “She used to be a head taller than me, and now she’s a shrunken old woman, and paralyzed into the bargain.” Other details follow, and in conclusion: “I’m not afraid of death; I’m afraid of death in life.” Nothing like recourse to philosophical reflection to camouflage a belated revenge.

  Fragments, fugitive thoughts, you say. Can you call them fugitive when you are dealing with obsessions — with thoughts whose precise quality is not to flee?

  I had just written a very temperate, very correct note to someone who scarcely deserved it. Before sending it, I added a few allusions vaguely tinged with gall. And then, just when I was putting the thing in the mailbox, I felt myself clutched by rage and, along with it, by a disdain for my noble impulse, for my regrettable fit of distinction.

  Picpus Cemetery. A young man and a lady past her prime. The caretaker explains that this cemetery is reserved for descendants of those who were guillotined. The lady blurts out, “But that’s who we are!” With what an expression! After all, she might have been telling the truth. Yet that provocative tone immediately put me on the executioner’s side.

  Opening Meister Eckhart’s Sermons, I read that suffering is intolerable to one who suffers for himself but light to one who suffers for God, because it is God who bears the burden, though it be heavy with the suffering of all mankind. It is no accident that I have come across this passage, for it perfectly applies to one who can never relieve himself of all that weighs upon him.

  According to the kabbala, God permits His splendor to diminish so that, men and angels can endure it — which comes down to saying that the Creation coincides with an impoverishment of the divine lumen, an effort toward darkness to which the Creator has assented. The hypothesis of God’s deliberate obscuration has the merit of making us accessible to our own shadows, responsible for our irreceptivity to a certain light.

  The ideal: to be able to repeat oneself like . . . Bach.

  Immense, supernatural aridity: as if I were beginning a second existence on another planet where speech is unknown, in a universe refractory to language and incapable of creating such a thing for itself.

  One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland — and no other.

  After reading in a work of psychoanalytic inspiration that as a young man Aristotle was jealous of Philip, the father of Alexander, his future pupil, one cannot help regarding a would-be therapeutic system in which such situations are posited as suspect, for it invents secrets for the pleasure of inventing explanations and cures.

  There is something of the charlatan in anyone who triumphs in any realm whatever.

  Visit a hospital, and in five minutes you become a Buddhist, or become one again if you have left off being such a thing.

  Parmenides. Nowhere do I perceive the Being he exalts, and fail to see myself in his sphere, which includes no fault, no place for me.

  In this compartment, a hideous woman sitting opposite, snoring, mouth open: an obscene agony. What was to be done? How endure such a spectacle? Stalin came to my aid. In his youth, passing between two rows of cossacks who were whipping him, he utterly concentrated upon reading a book, so that his consciousness of the blows was completely diverted. Strengthened by this example, I too plunged into my book, and halted at each word with extreme application till the moment the monster ended her agony.

  I was saying to a friend the other day that while I no longer believed in “writing,” I was reluctant to abandon it, that work was a defensible illusion, and that after scribbling a page or even a sentence, I always felt like whistling.

  Religions, like the ideologies that have inherited their vices, are reduced to crusades against humor.

  Every philosopher I've ever known, without exception, was “impulsive.” This flaw of the West has marked the very ones who should be exempt from it.

  To be like God and not like the gods, that is the goal of the true mystics, who aim too high to condescend to polytheism.

  I am invited to a colloquium abroad, there being a need, apparently, for my vacillations. The skeptic-on-duty of a decaying world.

  My habitation? I shall never know. True, one has no better knowledge of where God resides, for what is the sense of the expression “to reside in oneself” for those of us who lack any basis, both in and outside ourselves?

  I abuse the word God; I use it often, too often. I employ it each time I touch an extremity and need a word to designate what comes after. I prefer God to the Inconceivable.

  One work of piety declares that the inability to take sides is a sign one is not “enlightened by the divine light.” In other words, irresolution, that total objectivity, is the road to perdition.

  I infallibly discern a flaw in all those who are interested in the same things as myself. . . .

  To have read through a work on old age solely because the author’s photograph led me to do so. That mixture of rictus and entreaty, and that expression of grimacing stupor — what hype, what an endorsement!

  “This world was not created according to the will of Life,” it is said in the Ginza, a Gnostic text of a Mandaean sect in Mesopotamia. Remember this whenever you have no better argument to neutralize a disappointment.

  After so many years, after a whole life, I saw her again. “Why are you crying?” I asked her immediately. “I’m not,” she answered. And indeed she was not crying, she was smiling at me, but age having distorted her features, joy no longer found access to her face, on which one might also have read, “Whoever does not die young will regret it sooner or later.”

  A man who survives spoils his . . . biography. In the long run, the only destinies that can be regarded as fulfilled are obstructed ones.

  We should bother our friends only for our burial. And even then . . .!

  Boredom, with a bad reputation for frivolity, nonetheless allows us to glimpse the abyss from which issues the need for prayer.

  “God has created nothing more odious to Himself than this world, and from the day He created it. He has not glanced at it again, so much does He loathe it.” The Moslem mystic who wrote that, I don’t know who it was, I shall never know this friend’s name.

  Undeniable trump card of the dying: being able to utter banalities without compromising themselves.

  Retiring to the countryside after the death of his daughter, Tullia, Cicero, overwhelmed by grief, wrote letters of consolation to himself. A pity they have not been recovered and, still more, that such a therapeutics has not found favor! True, if it had been adopted, religions would long since have gone bankrupt.

  A patrimony all our own: the hours when we have done nothing. . . . It is they that form us, that individualize us, that make us dissimilar.

  A Danish psychoanalyst suffering from insistent migraine and who had undergone treatment with a colleague, to no effect, went to Freud, who cure
d him in several months. It was Freud himself who declared he had done so, and he was readily believed. A disciple, however inept, cannot fail to feel better after daily contact with his master. What better cure than to see the man whom one esteems most in the world taking such extended interest in your miseries! Few infirmities would not yield to such solicitude. Let us recall that the master had every quality of a founder of a sect, though disguised as a man of science. If he achieved cures, it was less by method than by faith.

  “Old age is the most unexpected thing of all that happens to man,” notes Trotsky a few years before his end. If, as a young man, he had had the exact, visceral intuition of this truth, what a miserable revolutionary he would have made!

  Noble deeds are possible only in periods when self-irony is not yet rife.

  It was his lot to fulfill himself only halfway. Everything in him was truncated: his way of life, like his way of thinking. A man of fragments, himself a fragment.

  Dreams, by abolishing time, abolish death. The deceased take advantage of them in order to importune us. Last night, there was my father. He was just as I have always known him, yet I had a moment’s hesitation. Suppose it wasn’t my father? We embraced in the Rumanian manner but, as always with him, without effusion, without warmth, without the demonstrativeness customary in an expansive people. It was because of that sober, icy kiss that I knew it was indeed my father. I woke up realizing that one resuscitates only as an intruder, as a dream-spoiler, and that such distressing immortality is the only kind there is.

  Punctuality, a kind of “pathology of scruple,” To be on time, I would be capable of committing a crime.

  Above the pre-Socratics, one is occasionally inclined to set those heresiarchs whose works were mutilated or destroyed and who survive only in a few fragments of speech, as mysterious as one could wish for.

  Why, after performing a good deed, does one long to follow a flag, any flag? Generous impulses involve a certain danger; they make one lose one’s head — unless one is generous precisely because one has lost one’s head already, generosity being a patent form of intoxication.

  Each time the future seems conceivable to me, I have the impression of having been visited by Grace.

  If only it were possible to identify that vice of fabrication whose trace the universe so visibly bears!

  I am always amazed to see how lively, normal, and unassailable low feelings are. When you experience them, you feel cheered, restored to the community, on equal footing with your kind.

  If man so readily forgets he is accursed, it is because he has always been so.

  Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

  A man who sees himself as he is stands higher than a man who raises the dead, according to a saint. Not knowing oneself is the universal law, and no one transgresses it with impunity. The truth is that no one has the courage to transgress it, which accounts for the saint’s exaggeration.

  It is easier to imitate Jupiter than Lao-Tse.

  Keeping up is the mark of a fluctuating mind that pursues nothing personal, that is unsuited to obsession, that continual impasse.

  The eminent ecclesiastic sneered at Original Sin. “That sin is your livelihood. Without it you would starve to death, for your ministry would have no further meaning. If man has not fallen since his origins, why has Christ come? To redeem whom, and what?” To my objections, his sole response was a condescending smile. A religion is finished when only its adversaries strive to preserve its integrity.

  The Germans do not see that it is absurd to put a Pascal and a Heidegger in the same bag. The abyss yawns between a Schicksal and a Beruf, between a destiny and a profession.

  A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.

  To have nothing more in common with men than the fact of being a man!

  A sensation must have fallen very low to deign to turn into an idea.

  Believing in God dispenses one from believing in anything else — which is an estimable advantage. I have always envied those who believed in Him, though to believe oneself God seems easier to me than believing in God.

  A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after the autopsy, is less than a corpse.

  Each desire provokes in me a counterdesire, so that whatever I do, all that matters is what I have not done.

  Sarvam anityam: All is transitory (Buddha). A formula one should repeat at every hour of the day, at the — admirable — risk of dying of it.

  Some diabolic thirst keeps me from exposing my pact with breathing.

  To lose sleep and to change language: two ordeals, one not dependent on oneself, the other deliberate. Alone, face to face with the nights and with words.

  The healthy are not real. They have everything except being — which is uniquely conferred by uncertain health.

  Of all the ancients, Epicurus may have been best at disdaining the mob — one more reason for celebrating him. What a notion, to place a clown like Diogenes in so lofty a niche! It is the Garden in question I should have haunted, and not the marketplace, nor — a fortiori — the tub. . . . (Yet Epicurus himself has disappointed me more than once: does he not call Theognis of Megara a fool for proclaiming it was better not to be born or, once born, to pass as soon as possible through the gates of Hades?)

  “If I were assigned to classify human miseries,” writes the young Tocqueville, “I should do so in this order: sickness, death, doubt.” Doubt as scourge: I could never have put forth such an opinion, but I understand it as well as if I had uttered it myself — in another life.

  “The end of humanity will come when everyone is like me,” I declared one day in a fit I have no right to identify.

  No sooner does the door close behind me than I exclaim, “What perfection in the parody of hell!”

  “It is for the gods to come to me, not for me to go to them,” Plotinus answered his disciple Amelius, who had sought to take him to a religious ceremony. In whom in the Christian world could we find a like quality of pride?

  You had to let him talk on, talk about everything, and try to isolate the dazzling things that escaped him. It was a meaningless verbal eruption with the histrionic and crazy gesticulations of a saint. To put yourself on his level, you had to divagate in his fashion, to utter sublime and incoherent sentences. A posthumous tête-à-tête, between impassioned ghosts.

  At Saint-Séverin, listening to the organist play the Art of the Fugue, I kept saying to myself, over and over, “There is the refutation of all my anathemas.”

  2

  Joseph de Maistre

  An Essay on Reactionary Thought

  AMONG THINKERS — such as Nietzsche or Saint Paul — with the appetite and the genius for provocation, Joseph de Maistre occupies a place anything but negligible. Raising the most trivial problem to the level of paradox and the dignity of scandal, brandishing anathemas with enthusiastic cruelty, he created an oeuvre rich in enormities, a system that unfailingly seduces and exasperates. The scope and eloquence of his umbrage, the passion he devoted to indefensible causes, his tenacity in legitimizing one injustice after another, and his predilection for the deadly epithet make of him that immoderate disputant who, not deigning to persuade the adversary, crushes him with an adjective straight off. His convictions have an appearance of great firmness: he managed to overpower the solicitations of skepticism by the arrogance of his prejudices, by the dogmatic vehemence of his contempt.

  Toward the end of the last century, at the height of the liberal illusion, it was possible to indulge in the luxury of calling him the “prophet of the past,” of regarding him as a relic or an aberrant phenomenon But we — in a somewhat more disabused epoch — know he is one of us precisely to the degree that he was a “monster”; it is in fact by the odious aspect of his “doctrines” that he lives for us, that he is our contemporary. Even if h
e were obsolete, moreover, he would still belong to that family of minds which date incorruptibly.

  We must envy his luck, his privilege of disconcerting both admirers and detractors, of obliging either party to wonder: did he really produce an apology for the executioner and for war, or merely confine himself to acknowledging their necessity? In his indictment of Port-Royal, did he express what he really thought, or simply yield to a momentary impulse? Where does the theoretician leave off and the partisan begin? Was he a cynic, an enthusiast, or merely an aesthete who strayed into Catholicism?

  To sustain the ambiguity, to confound us with convictions as clear-cut as his: this was certainly a tour de force. Inevitably readers began to question the authenticity of his fanaticism, to note the restrictions he himself set upon the brutality of his remarks, and insistently to cite his rare complicities with common sense. We ourselves shall not insult him by supposing him tepid. What attracts us is his pride, his marvelous insolence, his lack of equity, of pro-portion, and occasionally of decency. If he did not constantly irritate us, would we still have the patience to read him? The truths of which he made himself an apostle amount to something only by the impassioned distortion his temperament infected upon them. He transfigured the insipidities of the catechism and imparted to ecclesiastical commonplaces a flavor of extravagance. Religions die for lack of paradox: he knew this, or felt it, and in order to save Christianity, he contrived to inject it with a little more spice, a little more horror. Here he was aided much more by his talent as a writer than by his piety, which, in the opinion of Madame Swetchine, who knew him well, lacked any warmth whatever. Infatuated with corrosive expression, how could he stoop to the flabby phrases of the missal? (A pamphleteer at prayer? Conceivable, though hardly attractive.) Humility, a virtue alien to his nature, he pretends to only when he remembers that he must react as a Christian. Some of his exegetes have impugned— not without regret — his sincerity, whereas they ought to have relished the uneasiness he inspired: without his contradictions, without the misunderstandings that he — either by instinct or by design — created about himself, his case would have been dismissed long since, his career been closed, and his work suffered the misfortune of being understood, the worst fate that can befall an author.